“This book is so interesting I did 60 minutes on the treadmill yesterday instead of the usual 30 because I couldn’t stop reading.” —Joel Spolsky on Joel on Software

“Coders at Work should inspire readers to learn about the wider context of their craft and stop the reinvention of the proverbial wheel” —Vladimir Sedachfrom review atSlashdot

“Peter Seibel asks the sort of questions only a fellow programmer would ask. Reading this book may be the next best thing to chatting with these illustrious programmers in person.” —Ehud Lamm, Founder of Lambda the Ultimate - the programming languages weblog

“I highly recommend it.” —Andy Mulholland, CTO, Capgemini

“I have long known the names and of the work of about half of the programmers in Peter Seibel’s wonderful book, Coders at Work; and it is fascinating to read their ideas about their lives and their ideas about programming. Better yet, I have now learned about the lives and philosophies of the other half of the programmers in the book, whose systems were known to me but the programmers themselves were not. Anyone interested in computer programming and what makes a great computer programmer will enjoy this book.” —Dave Walden, original member of the BBN ARPANET team

“These are wonderful interviews and this looks to be a bible for any programmer who aspires to be better.” —Peter Christensen, Founder of GeekStack.com

“This book is dead sexy. When it comes out, you should definitely get a copy.” —Joseph F. Miklojcik IIIfrom review atjfm3> _

“Read it, because then you will know the greatest coding brains.” —Amit Shawfrom review atTeleported Bits

“One of the other core questions Peter asks is, what books would you recommend to help a developer learn programming? For me, this book joins my short list—it takes you away from the limitations of learning within a single company or community, and shows you the breadth of experiences that can make someone a great developer.”
—Marc Hedlundfrom review atO’Reilly Radar

Brendan Eich

Creator of JavaScript, perhaps the most widely used and most reviled programming language on the modern Web, Brendan Eich is now CTO of the Mozilla Corporation, the subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation responsible for continuing development of the Firefox browser.

With an appreciation of both elegant theory and good pragmatic engineering, Eich spent the early days of his career hacking network and kernel code at Silicon Graphics and MicroUnity. After MicroUnity, he moved to Netscape, where he worked on the Netscape browser and, under intense time pressure, invented JavaScript.

In 1998, along with Jamie Zawinski, he was one of the leaders of the effort to convince Netscape to open-source its browser, leading to the formation of mozilla.org, where he was chief architect.

In recent years Eich has been involved in both high-level direction setting for the Mozilla platform and in low-level hacking on a new JIT’ing JavaScript virtual machine called TraceMonkey. And, as he explains in this interview, he has also been trying to find ways for the Mozilla project to “move the research needle,” bringing practical-minded academics into the Mozilla fold in order to bridge the gap between academic theory and industrial practice.

Other topics we touched on include why JavaScript had to look somewhat like Java but not too much, why JavaScript does still need to grow as a language despite the failure of the ECMAScript 4 project, and the need for more kinds of static code analysis.